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From contaminated cucumbers to mislabeled energy drinks, food recalls have made several headlines this year. Suppliers and distributors will likely do the same for items that public health announcements instruct shoppers to do. In other words, throw away the item.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture together oversaw 294 individual food recalls during the first six months of 2025, according to a report from compliance firm Sedgwick. The FDA ordered more than twice as many — nearly 85 million — to be destroyed in the first six months of 2024. The USDA recall affected nearly 1.5 million pounds of food, nearly three times more than the same time last year.
Some companies may explore disposal alternatives, but sources say most of these items could end up in landfills.
“There are probably many potential, legally appropriate and compliant ways to deal with this problem, but everyone has a garbage can,” said Tracy Johnson-Hall, clinical professor of operations and information systems management at William & Mary.
Although other food chain issues, such as accident handling or uncertainty about expiration dates, result in much larger amounts of food waste, recalls still play an important role. More and more companies are investing in unpackaging technologies to recover these foods for recycling, but there is limited data on how much of the food is recovered. Wary of claims that edible items are being landfilled or incinerated, several recyclers offering certified disposal services declined to comment for this story.
In many cases, items that are recalled or simply no longer sent through the supply chain are perfectly safe for people to eat. These products could have implications for other businesses that target consumers who are reluctant to let good food go to waste.
Explore recall regulations
For companies that have goals or guidelines to reduce uneaten inventory, because of their size, there are other sources of waste that can be prioritized for reduction. For example, nearly a quarter of food surplus comes from overproduction, while nearly a fifth is not harvested at all.
According to ReFED’s Food Waste Monitor, food safety issues, excluding date label issues, account for about 2.4% of all food waste generated in the United States each year.
Items are often voluntarily removed from sale as a way to comply with rules established by the FDA and USDA. But federal departments can seize items and help with inspections and monitoring to catch contamination and other problems.
Staffing and funding cuts at the FDA this year could hinder these efforts. As a result, McGuireWoods recommended in the latest edition of the Sedgwick U.S. Recall Index Report that companies monitor product safety more actively.
Meanwhile, consumers are expecting better recall systems and safety nets to catch potential problems. In an August webinar, Sedgwick’s staff said it was difficult to see how these expectations could lead to fewer food recalls in the future.
In theory, brands with recalled items can try to find management solutions that fit elsewhere on the waste scale. That means deploying upcycling, conversion to animal feed, composting and anaerobic digestion rather than landfill. In fact, sources say these options are ignored for a variety of reasons. Foods are most likely to be recalled due to allergen contamination. Of these, milk is the biggest problem, followed by pathogens.
“It’s up to you to make sure you’re not putting anything into your commerce that could harm anyone,” says Mark Carter, a food quality and safety consultant and former president of the International Food Protection Association. Items with microbial, physical or chemical hazards cannot be re-entered into the market.
Some food producers are trying to reduce the chances of an item being discontinued in the first place. Packaging design and ingredient selection, as well as recent interest in finding more “natural” additives that inhibit pathogens, may help achieve this ambition.
Sometimes a product is released after the problem is resolved, but this is rare. Carter says cutting off individual bags of potato chips, throwing them away, and putting the contents back into the bag probably won’t work. However, they say it is possible to put granola bars into new, accurately labeled pouches.
Non-disposal options are often available for recalled items. Wheat allergens, for example, do not interfere with composting, and Carter has seen recalled food sometimes turned into animal feed. But companies may find coordinating these disposal options cumbersome, Johnson-Hall said.
By the time the recall begins, the food may be sitting on distribution centers or store shelves across the country. Federal disposal guidelines generally recommend recall efforts to comply with state and local regulations, Johnson-Hall said. In some areas, composting or anaerobic digestion may be required by law. But if not, it’s likely easiest to just set the standard action as the default everywhere else, and that probably means the dumpster.
States with organics recycling mandates sometimes provide exceptions for recalled food. For example, New York requires certain businesses and facilities to recycle food scraps. The exception is items that are “subject to recall or confiscation due to the presence of pathogens.”
In Massachusetts, businesses and operators that produce more than a half ton of organic waste each week are prohibited from sending that material to the trash, although there is an exemption for recycling, said Lorenzo Macaluso, chief growth officer at the Center for EcoTechnology. Whether your document will be approved will depend on what your waste contains and whether your local organics recycler is willing to accept it.
Where possible and legal, using more conventional disposal methods may provide peace of mind. At a previous job where she had to manage expired sugar, Johnson-Hall said her company considered repurposing the ingredient into insect bait before embracing incineration.
“Ultimately, the company wanted to know that this item was gone,” she said.
Undeclared allergens were still the leading cause of FDA food recalls in the first quarter of 2024, with 50 incidents, according to Sedgwick’s latest Recall Index. The most common allergen was milk, with 18 recalls, followed by tree nuts with eight.
Sarah Silbiger via Getty Images
Upcycling Opportunities
Food supply chains can also suffer from items that are safe to eat but do not meet corporate quality standards. Sources say this allows for better control of out-of-spec items (or if internal quality errors are identified before they are shipped to customers).
Carter said brands are more motivated to repurpose these items, especially if their shelf life is long enough. Baked goods that turn out a little lighter than expected might go to a discount store, or a brokerage might find another customer interested in peanut butter that’s too thick.
Misfits Market sees these kinds of mistakes as good sales opportunities. Founded in 2018, the company works with growers and private label suppliers to deliver off-spec items or internal quality issues to grocery delivery services, either as-is or incorporated into new products.
“If we can help find higher and higher usage streams for products that would otherwise be farmed, landfilled or animal feed, and level that up into consumer packaged goods, there is a financial benefit,” said Morgan Drummond, senior director of private label at the company. “We can help them get more ROI on these products. They may only be worth a dollar.”
Misfits Market offers produce that doesn’t meet the highest levels of USDA grading standards that other retailers avoid. Guidelines for different crops often ignore aesthetic differences, such as stripes on apples or spots on beans, that do not affect taste or texture.
If a company doesn’t provide customers with food as is, they can “rescue” or “upcycle” the items into packaged products, such as using rice with too many broken grains for pudding. One Misfits Market supplier is a biscotti bakery that regularly sends broken pieces to the animal feed system. Some crumbles still make their way into agricultural settings, but Misfits now incorporates the biscotti pieces into other products and pays producers more per pound.
The company has gone through the days of questioning its suppliers’ ability to produce new products with appropriate food safety measures. To date in 2025, Misfits Markets has prevented more than 14 million pounds of food from going to waste, according to Jessie Kimsey, the company’s CPG category innovation and supplier strategy manager.
“If we could duplicate and replicate ourselves, we could also embrace all the opportunities that come with us,” Drummond said. Misfits Market can add new items or change options much faster than a typical grocery store, a skill needed if product lifespans are extended, Kimsey added.
This may require some dexterity, as suppliers try to keep identical, repeated out-of-spec mistakes to a minimum. Since production facilities essentially cook on a large scale, there are many things that can go wrong at any stage of the process. And if a company discovers that mistakes are continuing to happen, it may prefer to focus on stopping the problem rather than finding ways to recycle the byproducts, Johnson-Hall said.
When sales opportunities like those provided by Misfits Markets don’t work, you can better manage quality failures internally. The producer will probably maintain a relationship similar to that held by the biscotti manufacturer. We regularly handover animal feed or carry out composting operations for organic waste continuously generated during production. Internal quality issues can be routed to established disposal methods.
If producers take on greater responsibility for finding and addressing future recalls, existing concerns about the variety of food waste their companies generate will only increase.
“I think they’re very aware of food waste. It’s now become a part of their mindset more than anything else,” Carter said.
